What Age-Gap Relationships Reveal About Power, Sex, Love, and Desire

As age-gap relationships persist, despite the think-pieces, so will novels with age-gap relationships. I believe these novels offer something different—perhaps truer—than the story of a more traditional relationship. They can tell us so much about power, sex, love, and desire.

An age gap presents compelling complications for any storyteller as well. An age gap means that your characters will likely be at very different points in their lives, with different world views; there may be an existing marriage, or children to complicate things.

The character’s attitudes to sex could be different as well, revealing fascinating conflicts in their intimate relationships. And then there’s the ultimate issue, which is that one of the characters is statistically closer to death.

I am always drawn to these stories, in all their many varied forms, which is probably why I wrote one myself; my novel Bitter Sweet is the story of a relationship between a twenty-three-year-old publicity assistant, Charlie, and the fifty-six-year-old author she has obsessed over since she was a teenager, Richard.

Here are some of my own favorite age gap relationship novels. From the freeways of middle America to New York, Dublin, and Berlin, these are the books that I keep coming back to, that explore the ways in which an age gap can shape and define love, and how these same relationships leave us when they end.

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Kirsten Reed, The Ice Age

This is an excellent, strange little book that appeared in 2011 and had a profound impact on me, and apparently on Florence Welch who adorns the cover with a generous quote.

Without a doubt my favorite road trip book The Ice Age follows an unnamed seventeen-year-old narrator as she drives completely aimlessly across the U.S. with the much older, very strange Gunther. Is he a vampire? Is he her father? Does he really love her? We never really find out who he is, or how she ended up with him.

The novel explores the line between age and consent, naivety and vulnerability and the space between. It’s an edgy, punkish little novel that almost certainly influenced the relationship in Bitter Sweet when I read it in my twenties. If you can find a copy, you’ll read it in an afternoon.

Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

Mellors’ elegant, compulsive debut novel explores the doomed relationship between lovers Cleo and Frank. Frank’s age is never specified, but he is implied to be around twenty years Cleo’s senior, although his emotional maturity is really not much more than that of a teenager. These two are explosive when together, their love is messy and passionate at best, and at its worst, completely toxic.

Both Cleo and Frank, and indeed all of the supporting characters and the setting of New York, are drawn with such nuance on the page that you fall deeply into the story, wanting to reach into the pages of the book and lift the pair of them out, hold them, and help them. They are individually haunted by grief and addiction, unable to really be what each other needs.

Their love story is beautiful and sad and written with such tenderness that it has broken hearts and incited gallons of tears around the world. And the sugar glider—well, if you know, you know.

Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

 Nick and Frances, Frances and Nick. Ten years apart, yet both with the emotionally maturity of fifteen-year-olds. I love Rooney’s writing and this is her at her best, unravelling her characters slowly and with such restraint that it is impossible to look away.

Something about this particular relationship makes for very uncomfortable reading; the relationship is always slightly out of reach for both these characters, and the infidelity adds such tension. We also have Nick’s wife Meliisa, who again, is slightly older, and her relationship with Frances’ ex, Bobbi.

So many wonderful age gap and power dynamics going on in this novel that really set the tone for a whole generation of writers to come.

Louise Kennedy, Trespasses

This absolutely devastating novel set in Northern Ireland in 1975 follows the affair between young Cushla, and older, married British lawyer Micheal. Everything about this novel is perfect.

The prose, staccato and refined and ever so slightly detached, paints the setting so viscerally; every single character in the ensemble around these doomed lovers is multi-dimensional and written with such tenderness and understanding that they leap off the page and into your heart, where they will stay forever.

I read this book after I had written Bitter Sweet and honestly wanted to throw mine in the bin and move under a rock because it is that good. It made me a better writer just by reading it. The ending will destroy you, even if you know what’s coming.

Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos

 Kairos (with an English translation by Michael Hofmann) won the international Booker in 2024 and was a most worthy winner. Set in Germany in the 1980s, a compelling period of history that is painted very visually by Erpenbeck, Kairos is both about love and the end of love. It opens with Katharina in the present learning of the death of her former lover, Hans, who was thirty-four years her senior.

This beautiful book follows the ups and downs of their relationship from the time that they meet when Katharina is nineteen, through time and space as the Berlin Wall falls, as Hans’ marriage disintegrates, and as Katharina grows up. It is an utterly beautiful novel written with such impressive reserve and emotion that you will never forget it.

A little piece of my heart is still broken a year after reading.

Raven Leilani, Luster

 If you love a Hot Mess of a main female character, and let’s face it we all do, then this one is for you. Edie is just trying to survive life in a dead-end admin job in an all-white office, sleeping with all the wrong men, and losing sight of any ambition and dreams she might have ever had.

When she meets Eric, a white middle-aged man with a suburban family (who also happens to be in an sort-of open marriage) she immediately falls through the trap door into her latest disaster of a romantic relationship. When she then loses her job and has to move in with him and his family—including his adopted black daughter—things get really interesting!

Luster is a nuanced, compulsively readable book about the constantly shifting landscape of sexual and racial politics.

Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

 The book that became the movie Carol is Highsmith’s only directly “lesbian novel” and one which she originally published under a pseudonym in 1952. This beautiful love story is about the forbidden romantic relationship between the younger Therese, a lonely woman working in a department store in Manhattan, and the equally lonely but wealthy, older Carol. Carol is facing a divorce and the possibility of losing her child because of her affairs with women.

The complexities and awful unfairness faced by queer people in 1950’s America are explored with such quiet fury, and the love and affection between Carol and Therese is so true and gentle, that this is maybe Highsmith’s finest novel. The love between Therese and Carol unravels slowly and with all of Highsmith’s signature pacing it feels at times like a thriller.

I love this book for its relatively happy ending.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

 I could not write this list and exclude James Baldwin’s extraordinary 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room. A heartbreaking, rite of passage novel for many of us, Giovanni’s Room tells of American David, our narrator, and the younger, Italian barman he is obsessed with, Giovanni.

Spoiler: It doesn’t end well. Only it’s not really a spoiler because Baldwin cleverly leads the reader through the novel always knowing that it will end with the worst day of David’s life, the day that Giovanni is executed for his homosexuality.

This knockout novel explores bisexuality, masculinity, homosexuality and social isolation as well as love and grief and sex. I can’t recommend it enough.

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Bitter Sweet by Hattie Williams is available via Ballantine Books.